One reason for this is, if the film is positive about the military, it is good public relations, and thus the movie supports the mission. If the movie is really good — both a positive portrayal of the military and a box-office success — it may even be a boon for military recruiting. Indeed, the Navy stated that after the release of Top Gun, the number of young men enlisting with a desire to be Naval aviators went up by 500 percent.

There's a catch — a Department of Defense project officer will keep an eagle eye on the script and production phases. If they don't like the portrayal of the military in your film, they will yank the co-operation. This was a major reason for the failure of the TV series Supercarrier. Other movies DoD rejected include Forrest Gump (because the army protagonist was stupid), Mars Attacks!! (because everyonewas stupid), and Independence Day. By the way that last one should tell you Pentagon refusal isn't always about wanting to look good but for any number of reasons that may seem arcane to non-DOD personnel. Independence Day wasn't supported because it infringed on certain (then classified) facilities that the Pentagon cannot legally either confirm or deny regardless of its dissemination into pop-culture, certainly not in film.

Still, if your film just has to have a full-sized aircraft carrier, where else can one turn? There are options for creative filmmakers. For instance, The Asylum filmed its Battleship knockoff American Warships on a museum ship, and CGI can accomplish a lot. But for sheer accuracy and time-saving, Pentagon backing remains an enticing option.

Note that while production assistance rarely comes from all the military services, nevertheless all projects must, without exception, be approved by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, or his designee, before any full official support can be granted at all. If a production is for instance primarily about the Navy and Marine Corps, the production team will probably only maintain contact with representatives from the Department of the Navy. Which can occasionally lead to some amusing results. The Navy technical advisors will be very careful about getting Navy details right and making sure the Navy looks good on the screen... but might not care one bit if it makes the Army or the Air Force look bad!

As might be gleaned from that list, movies can certainly succeed and even thrive without the DoD's help. Still, it costs quite a bit more money to go it alone, so some filmmakers give concessions on the script rather than face studio rejection. Sometimes this can be subtle, while other times it becomes almost a form of Executive Meddling. This article covers things in a little more depth.

This is not a solely American trope - it has happened on both sides of the Iron Curtain (the Red Army supplied extras in astonishing numbers to several epics), and elsewhere.

It’s also not limited to the military. If you're shooting a motion picture or television series about any kind of specialized public profession with either lots of hardware or specific locations; such as a police department, fire department, space agency, or even ocean lifeguards; it can be very beneficial from both an artistic and financial point of view to get help from the real thing.

Examples

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US examples

Film

Black Hawk Down did make a major change to the true story, possibly at the Pentagon's behest. The clerk was replaced by a fictional character, for the very good reason that that person had been convicted of sexually assaulting his own daughter.

In the World War II set film The Enemy Below, the crew of the destroyer used for the film played the role of the ship's crew in the film, including the captain, who played the chief engineer.

Pearl Harbor film Tora! Tora! Tora! was filmed on the various active military bases around Oahu attacked that day, and featured a lot of pyrotechnics set off on said bases. It also featured a large number of US naval vessels standing in for ships that were there that day, causing a lot of unavoidable anachronism.

A Few Good Men did not have Pentagon approval, and had to shoot in alternate locations.

Another movie about Marines, Heartbreak Ridge, was initially backed by the military, until they saw the amount of profanity/crudity spouted by Clint Eastwood's character (and others). They pulled their support after that.

The Final Countdown features a considerable number of the crew of the real USS Nimitz. About the only thing they couldn't do was ask the captain to actually sail into Pearl Harbor (the Nimitz was stationed in the Atlantic at the time).

One of the biggest bumps in the live-action Transformers movie was that most of the military hardware was going to become the vehicle mode of the Decepticons (bad guys), from a modified Abrams tank for Devastator Brawl to the top-of-the-line F-22 used for Starscream. In fact, according to the DVD's special features, it was the military's liaison officer who managed to convince them to let the shoot continue, as, good or evil, the Decepticons were being portrayed as the most badass robots in existence — for example, that an ace flier like Starscream, forced to adopt a disguise to hide in an inferior culture, would naturally go with the most dangerous fighter in the world. It also probably helped that (unlike the series on which it is based) this was one of the only alien invasion movies where the military have weapons that actually work (the military men being the good guys who side with the good robots with the intelligence officers being the obstructive bureaucrats who try to capture and study the evil robots was likely a factor). In fact, the two V-22 Ospreys in Qatar at the start of the movie were the only two such aircraft in the USAF at the time.

Michael Bay has been honest in calling himself a "world class ass kisser." The military looks good in his films and he is proud of that fact. He also talked about how obsessed with details they are, the uniforms are accurate and the terminology used was filmed as a training scenario with the actual people who do those things. One scene had a young analyst slipping into a private meeting in the Pentagon held by the Secretary of Defense. The technical advisors said that there is no way that would ever happen — security in such meetings is too strong. A compromise was made: someone knocked on the glass, acknowledging that the analyst was being observed.

Another Michael Bay film, Armageddon, had official support from both NASA and the Pentagon. NASA probably regretted this decision, as it now uses the film as a test for hiring managers: spot all the inaccuracies in the film.

the carrier that was attacked was originally to have been sunk, but in order to keep military support for the film, the script had to be adjusted so that the carrier survived, though it was mission killed (that is, couldn't do much of anything except limp away).

When the time came to film the nuclear detonation scene, in which the Presidential motorcade is severely damaged by the blastnote though their electronic devices, including civilian cell phones that aren't hardened against EMP, continue to work just fine, the director used real military personnel that were trained specifically for that situation. All he had to do was point to the overturned limo and tell them "The President is in that car!"

Amazingly, the Army approved Stripes because they thought it would be a good recruitment tool. Even more amazingly, they were right!

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra featured real Apache helicopters flown by real Army pilots. Odd, as most of the film deals with fantastic vehicles and weapons that bear no resemblance to the real military.

Crimson Tide depicted a mutiny on a US Navy submarine, so naturally didn't make the cut. To get around this the filmmakers used chase helicopters to follow an actual submarine out to sea so they could film it diving. They also used a French aircraft carrier for some scenes.

The scene in The Bourne Identity in the US Consulate in Switzerland features a team of US Marines who are the actual guards of US Embassies and other State department buildings.

The US, British and French militaries supplied about 23,000 troops during the filming of The Longest Day.

In Battle: Los Angeles, the USMC provided a number of troops to serve as extras, and lent a huge amount of aircraft such as various helicopters and even V-22 Opsreys. They also allowed the crew to film some parts of the movie in Camp Pendleton. Behind the scenes, the cast were trained at a boot camp run by military advisors to make sure they acted, fought, and spoke like Marines. Aaron Eckhart joked that they were very particular about the terminology they used, such as calling a helicopter a "helo" instead of a "chopper".

Similarly to Platoon, The Hurt Locker didn't have military backing, partially because of budget issues. One might think the film's much-criticized lapses in military procedure would have been fixed had they had Army consultants. They didn't... but, curiously, when director Kathryn Bigelow and producer-screenwriter Mark Boal were making Zero Dark Thirty, about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, they discovered that several highly-placed officials in DoD and the CIA (including then Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta, who went on to become Secretary of Defense) were fans of the film, and they ''did'' receive considerable assistance from those agencies.

Iron Man - The Air Force provided material with the then-new Airman's Battle Uniform's camouflage patterm. Actor Terrance Howard also did some immersion research with airmen to prepare for the role.

The Pentagon backed out of supporting The Avengers (2012), specifically because of the ambiguous role of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the movie (part of the U.S. military? An international organization?), and as a result, what sort of Constitutional authority, if any, it would have over U.S. military personnel. The movie's Omniscient Council of Vagueness appears to be multinational, and even if it isn't, it's not clear that they're properly in the military chain of command.

In Jack Webb's The DI, active-duty Marines portray all but one of the recruits.

In the film adaption of Battleship, the US Navy bent over backwards to provide both locations and personnel for the shoot. Those extras and even most of the named characters in the film? Serving personnel, some of them playing themselves.

Act of Valor (which started life as a recruitment film) takes this to an even greater extreme, as the main characters are all played by real U.S. Navy SEALS (who were between deployments at the time of shooting), the crew was given unparalleled access to Navy equipment, live ammo was used for most scenes (not to mention a scene where a truck gets blown up with an RPG that was done for real without any effects) all the tactics used in the film are real, and several things in the film are based on real life missions. It's worth mentioning that the film gained a considerable amount of support after Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. SEALS.

Seven Days in May was pointedly not given any Pentagon backing, due to the storyline concerning a rogue Air Force general (modeled after real-life generals Curtis LeMay, then Air Force Chief of Staff, and recently-retired USAF General Edwin Walker) planning a Military Coup. This led to situations where John Frankenheimer resorted to guerilla filmmaking — they needed a shot of Col. "Jiggs" Casey (played by Kirk Douglas) entering into the Pentagon, a shot that, without DoD's explicit OK, would have been considered close to espionage. Frankenheimer set up a camera in a station wagon and had Douglas, in full costume, walk up the Pentagon steps. The two soldiers who saluted Douglas were giving genuine salutes, not realizing he was a Hollywood star and not a marine colonel. However, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, President John F. Kennedy, did back the film, to the point of vacating the White House whenever they wanted to film there. It says something about the truths of the film that the President's backing wasn't enough to get the Pentagon to back it (and he's their commander!).

Sgt Bilko has a note at the end of the film which gratefully acknowledges the total lack of cooperation from the Army.

The CIA's involvement with Zero Dark Thirty actually became a major component of the controversy that surrounded the film, with some feeling that this was the reason for the film's depiction of the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. While director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal may or may not have approved of the use of torture, there was a strong chance that the CIA liaisons advising them did.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), original version, was another film where the army refused to help-they didn't like the film's peaceful message. The filmmakers ultimately got their tanks and weaponry from the National Guard instead.

For the film Stealth, the US Navy allowed the crew to film mockups of the fictional F-37 and other scenes on their aircraft carriers such as the USS Abraham Lincoln, USS Nimitz, and USS Carl Vinson. Allegedly, the Russian military initially panicked when their satellite surveillance photos showed a previously unseen, futuristic fighter plane on US aircraft carriers.

The military was very helpful with their portrayal in Man of Steel, as they ultimately help save the planet alongside Superman.

The Georgia Army National Guard provided assistance to Invasion USA (1985)'s production, including the Patton tanks, Huey helicopers, M113 APCs, and the soldiers you see towards the end of the movie.

Navy SEALs were involved in the making of Speed 2: Cruise Control. They were inside the underwater tank used for the "underwater kissing" scene.

The Department of Defense served as advisers for the portrayal of the Navy in Godzilla (2014) while also providing ships and aircraft for use in filming. The DoD wanted the Navy in particular to be used for the film because they had relatively little presence in films of the previous decade compared to the Army and Air Force. It was reportedly a tricky balancing act between portraying the military in a heroic manner and showing them as largely useless against the Nigh Invulnerable monsters they face. This article also describes some of the behind the scenes things that took place for this film.

Notably, military vehicles have no positive effect on the monsters and sometimes a detrimental one to humans (Godzilla taking out the Golden Gate Bridge can be directly attributed to the Navy ships firing on it, the helicopter attack in Hawaii only succeeds in destroying several passenger jets in a crash), but military personnel on foot do make successful strikes or delaying actions.

The French Connection had Eddie Egan and Buddy Rosso, the real-life cops the story was based on, hired as consultants. They were able to use their connections to get a verbal agreement with the NYPD and MTA to shoot the ending chase scene in Brooklyn. The law required trained personnel to operate the train, so real MTA staff, including the conductor, played their respective parts in the film.

Originally the Air Force just wanted to review the scripts to Stargate SG-1, but the producers decided to ask for advisors to avoid Artistic License – Military, and actually listened to them (though a few errors still got through - Samantha's hair getting too long, Gen. Landry having his hands in his pockets, etc). Before long, the show was using real Air Force personnel playing many of its extras, and two Chiefs of Staff appearing as themselves: Generals Michael E. Ryan and John P. Jumper. In a testament to how much the military likes the Stargate Verse, the real life NORAD has a door inside the building labeled "Stargate Command"note it's a broom closet, and Richard Dean Anderson was named an honorary Air Force brigadier general for his role as Jack O'Neill.note O'Neill would go on to outrank his actor, eventually shown as a 3-star lieutenant general on Stargate Universe.

In Stargate Continuum, the Navy let them film the outside and inside of a real nuclear attack submarine, in the Arctic, doing a number of through the ice-pack surfaces for it. Not to be outdone, the Air Force let them film inside real F-15's.

Dragnet was backed very heavily by the Los Angeles Police Department, and many off-duty officers became extras. Rather than let the producers of the show make mock-ups of the LAPD's distinctive shield-shaped badges, the two main characters were allowed to borrow genuine ones that were brought to the set every day by a police adviser. Reportedly, Joe Friday even had a working phone number. When Jack Webb, the actor who played Sgt. Joe Friday died, the badge number he used, 714, was retired from the LAPD, and is now buried with him.

Gunnery Sergeant (Honorary) R. Lee Ermey. A retired Marine drill instructor, he's portrayed similar roles in several movies and served as military technical adviser as well. He's hosted two military-themed shows (Mail Call and Lock 'n Load), and never had a problem accessing military bases and the biggest explosion-making toys they could offer.

Due to being filmed in New York, the Law & Order franchise has been able to use the NYPD's Movie/Television Division to full effect.

The various incarnations of Top Gear often manage to get the participation of military services and their hardware:

The original Top Gear pitted a British Army Apache attack helicopter against a Lotus Exige, to see if the car could outrun or evade it.note Of course it couldn't. Helicopters don't have to follow roads or go around buildings like cars do.

Played straight in another episode of Top Gear (US), where the hosts tried to use a Mercedes G-Class to outrun the 101st Airborne Division. They filmed in an actual military training ground, and the 101st used everything at their disposal, from helicopters to drones to Oshkosh M-ATVs.

The short-lived FOX cop-drama K-ville was filmed on location in New Orleans and the show was allowed to use the real-life uniforms and logos of the New Orleans Police.

For most of the latter half of the 20th century, the city of Chicago rarely permitted television shows or movies to use their police department's insignias, reportedly after The Blues Brothers mucked up their reputation. Shows and movies often had to make due with Captain Ersatz versions of the CPD (Hill Street Blues was supposedly set in a metropolis resembling Chicago that was never named). The Chicago Code, on the other hand, depicted the CPD quite accurately and was filmed on location. One possible explanation for the change was the fact that while the original ban was put into place by Mayor Richard J. Daley, his son and successor Richard M. Daley left office shortly before the show began production.

The first show produced by Gene Roddenberry was The Lieutenant, about a young U.S. Marine Corps officer. It was filmed with cooperation and technical support from the Marines, who withheld approval of one script that dealt with racial themes (and had Nichelle Nichols, who would go on to star on another of Roddenberry's shows, in a guest star role). The official position, apparently, was that the military did not have racial problems. Roddenberry went ahead and filmed the episode anyway, but it was not aired.

Short-lived (in part because it had the misfortune of starting to air in fall of 2001) series The Agency was Backed By The CIA, and was advertised as being the first time filming was allowed inside the actual CIA headquarters.

Other

The Carrier Classic, a Collegiate Basketball game is played annually on the deck of an aircraft carrier (hence the name), with the agreement of the Navy. Rivals Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina played the first game on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson at Naval Base San Diego on Veterans Day 2011 (11/11/11). The visuals alone are freaking epic, especially as the sun sets.

Similar to South Park using World of Warcraft, the developers behind PAYDAY: The Heist got help from Valve to recreate the set pieces of No Mercy, a level used in Valve's Left 4 Dead series. This collaboration helped create the No Mercy DLC for PAYDAY which has familiar set pieces like the vending machines and being startled by the Witch.

Music

The music video for Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time" was shot on the USS Missouri, with crew members as extras.

Video Games

The Medal of Honor 2010 reboot as well as its direct sequel Warfighter received technical advice from actual Tier One operators in the U.S. military. It later turned out that these operators did not have Pentagon permission to advise on the games for both occasions, and they were subsequently disciplined, making this a Subverted Trope.

The U.S. Army commissioned a special version of BattleZone from Atari as a trainer for the Bradley fighting vehicle.

America's Army was developed by the U.S. military for use as a recruitment tool.

In a non-military example, the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft", which lampooned World of Warcraft, received extensive support from Blizzard Entertainment, including the use of the Burning Crusade test servers to film the in-game portions of the episode.

Non-US examples

Anime and Manga

Yomigaeru Sora Rescue Wings revolves around Japan Air Self Defense Force search and rescue operations, and got considerable support from the Defense Agency (now the Defense Ministry). Footage from the show was later used in JASDF recruiting ads.

The production crew for the anime of Sentou Yousei Yukikaze visited a Japan Air Self-Defense Force base in Komatsu (which, incidentally, is the same air base that Yomigaeru Sora above received much of its military advisors from) and recorded actual jet noises as they took off. Several officers from the JASDF also provided technical assistance on making sure the aerial lingo was accurate.

Rocket Girls was written with technical advice from JAXA, which is the Japanese counterpart to NASA. A JAXA astronaut even gets a cameo As Herself in episode 7.

Uchuu Kyoudai was created with advice from both NASA and JAXA. In fact, whenever space technology was shown in the anime it had to be approved by both organizations. By adhering to these rules the series was allowed to use NASA's logo during production. And in fact, JAXA astronaut made two cameos in the anime, one of them recorded while he was on the ISS.

The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force provided technical assistance for the anime adaptation of Arpeggio of Blue Steel, and allowed the use of the destroyer Kirishima and their base at Yokosuka to film the music video for the opening theme song.

The filmakers of the original Gojira film were denied this support but in an interesting way of getting around that they found out the schedule of a military convoy (on its way to be decommissioned) and filmed it twice along its route without permission. This does explain why miniatures for military vehicles are used here and in later Godzilla movies even in scenes that don't feature any of the Kaiju. It was also filmed in cooperation with the Japanese Coast Guard.

The James Bond film Golden Eye was backed by the French navy, who lent the crew a frigate and a helicopter for a scene in which the helicopter is stolen (the helicopter is a model in later scenes though).

In return, the French Naval officer who was to be killed by Xenia Onatopp during sex had to be turned into a Canadian.

During the production of The World Is Not Enough, MI6 initially moved to block the filming of the scene where a bomb is set off through rigged money, citing security concerns - but were overruled by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, saying "After all Bond has done for Britain, it was the least we could do for Bond."

The The Lord of the Rings movies used the New Zealand army to do tasks from landscaping Hobbiton to filling out their legions of extras. The Mordor and Black Gate scenes were filmed on an abandoned minefield, being the only place in New Zealand with the right amount of ash and desolation.

Saving Private Ryan had the help of the Irish Army, Navy, and British MoD reserves for use as extras during the Omaha Beach sequence.

Irish Army Reservists also served as extras for Braveheart. Since as Craig Charles put it, "(they) see very little real action and were probably making the best of it", on-site medical personnel were kept rather busy during the fight sequences.

The sixties Danish monster movie Reptilicus featured dozens of soldiers and displays of some of the best gear possessed by the Danish army at the time (apparently unusual at the time; most similar movies had to rely on Stock Footage). That didn't stop the movie from being hilariously awful, though.

In Hero, starring Jet Li, the extras playing the soldiers of the Qin army were actual Chinese soldiers provided by the PLA. This was once again done in the Three Kingdoms period pieces Red Cliff and Red Cliff 2 where the soldiers of the Wei, Shu and Wu armies were PLA soldiers.

Those Wacky Nazis used thousands of soldiers, some diverted from fighting positions at considerable cost, as extras in the 1945 movie Kolberg, about the unsuccessful (though it was successful in the film) resistance of the fortress-town of Kolberg against the French in 1807. By the time the movie came out there were few theatres left unbombed to watch it in, so its propaganda effect was minimal to say the least.

In The Beast Of War, Captain Dale Dye negotiated to get an old Russian tank from the Israeli Defence Forces. The film, set in Afghanistan, was shot in the Sinai desert.

Possibly the most epic example: Sergey Bondarchuk's 1968 War and Peace movie, featuring horses and entire military units (as well as a special "cinematographical cavalry corps") provided by the Soviet Ministry of Defense. But then, the Soviet Ministry of Defense was very fond of this trope in general, often providing soldiers for patriotic war films.

In fact, the aforementioned last real cavalry regiment in Soviet and then Russian army is really kept almost entirely for the filmmaking purposes. It is even unofficially called "Mosfilm regiment" after the country's largest film studio is is usually subordinated to.

Sergei Bondarchuk did the same thing in 1971 in Waterloo, where Soviet soldiers were used in huge shots featuring thousands of soldiers. Hilarity Ensues in several known instances where the soldiers panicked and scattered during scenes with cavalry charges.

Most of the U.S. Marines who invade the Bashaw's palace in The Wind and the Lion were actually Spanish Special Forces, as the movie was filmed in Spain, with Sevilla and Almeria standing in for Tangier.

Many Vietnam War movies, such as Apocalypse Now and the Missing in Action series, were filmed in the Philippines, which has jungles, needs money, and most importantly, uses US military equipment. The Armed Forces of the Philippines often lent vehicles such as F-5s and Hueys to the film makers in place of American military vehicles.

Ironically the helicopters in Apocalypse Now were taken away to fight real-life communist guerillas in mid-production.

Likewise Roger Corman quickly realised the advantage of filming his exploitation cheapies there, such as the Girls Behind Bars movies which - besides the gratuitous nudity and mud-wrestling - also had plenty of action scenes.

The Swiss comedy movie Achtung, Fertig, Charlie!' (English: Ready, Set, Charlie!') set in basic training of the Swiss Army was supported by the Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (yes, it is rather odd) by providing vehicles, extras etc. Later on, said department criticised the moviemakers for their "unrealistic, comical illustration of basic training"...a claim most Swiss thought was silly, even if they agreed it was true, seeing as Switzerland has universal male conscription.

The Mexican military was going to provide the vehicles for the movie Once upon a Time in Mexico, but they changed their minds once they found out the villain was an army general. The filmmakers had to make do with donations from private collectors.

The 2010 remake of The Karate Kid got official support from the Chinese government, and features several prominent scenes set in notable national landmarks.

Sergei Eisenstein's films are made of this trope. The best example would have to be the film October: Ten days that shook the world in which Eisenstein convinced the powers that be to actually have the Cruiser "Aurora" shell the Winter Palace again. Apparently more people were injured in its re-enactment of the storming of the palace than were in the actual, historical event.

Lord of War is a subversion. Most of the military hardware - like the rows of battle tanks and the piles of rifles - is real. But, consistent with the theme of the movie, the lenders weren't governments but private arms dealers. In fact, several scenes had to be rushed because the weapons and vehicles being used had found a surprise buyer.

District 9 borrowed some Casspir APCs for the film, and also used them as part of the South African advertising campaign.

The live-action adaptation of '"Rescue Wings'' was set at the Komatsu JASDF airbase, and featured actual F-15s, UH-60Js and support from both the Air and Maritime Self Defense Forces.

In stark contrast to the above, the 2011 Chinese air combat filmSky Fighters (which apparently is also known as Lock Destination) is filled with CGI planes, despite being made with the full cooperation of the People's Liberation Army Air Force (specifically the Air Force Political Department of the People's Liberation Army). The plot takes great "inspiration" from Top Gun but if reviews of the film are any indication, it's a lot more of a snoozefest.

Another air combat movie, the South Korean film Soar Into the Sun (internationally released as ''R2B: Return to Base'') was released in 2012. It had the full support of the Republic of Korea Air Force and it shows in the usage of F-15Ks and T-50 fighter jets. It stars Korean superstar/heartthrob Rain as the main character, who after wrapping up filming, immediately enlisted in the military to fulfill his two years of mandatory national service.

The Scottish gangster film The Wee Man, about the life and crimes of the notorious Glasgow gangster Paul Ferris (and featuring him as a production consultant) is a spectacular aversion; not only did Strathclyde Police refuse to cooperate, the entire City of Glasgow refused to allow filming in its council ward, forcing the film-makers to use London instead.

The first filming of The Unknown Soldier was extensively backed by the Finnish Defense Forces, with authentic footage from battles in the Continuation War edited in to the film. The FDF also provided explosives experts and other advisors to make combat and artillery fire scenes look more authentic, as well as uniforms, weapons, tanks and other vehicles. The 1985 re-filming enjoyed most of the same privileges despite it being much darker and edgier - and, depending on whom you ask, more realistic than the 1955's heavily romanticized version.

Ah Boys to Men, a series of Singaporean-made comedy movies was one of the few films to have ever been completely backed up by the Singapore Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF). The Action Prologue featured real soldiers, vehicles (with slightly-adequate CGI) and tactics used by the Army, Navy and Air Force. Also notable; it is the first feature length film to have ever been filmed on Pulau Tekong, an nearby island used exclusively by the military where most recruits begin training.

In the climactic battle of the serial "The Invasion", most of the UNIT members are actual British soldiers of the Coldstream Guards. Highly impressive, considering Doctor Who's usual budget (a third of a shoestring).

The new series appears to be getting quite a bit of military backing, culminating in the appearance of Challenger II battle tanks in one of the Christmas specials.

A Polish 1960s cult series on WWII called Four tank men and a dog had its equipment granted (free of charge) by the Army. Either through connections or simply thanks to magic of Television. Someone called the general: "Comrade, we need a thousand men and a tank squad for two weeks, it's for TV series", and boom.

Top Gear frequently has appearances from members of the British Army or Royal Marines, taking part in all sorts of hijinks under the guise of car tests. This includes hunting down Jeremy Clarkson in a tank and more recently having the new Ford Fiesta take part in a Royal Marine beach assault.

In one episode, the RAFnote described as "a bunch of aeroplane enthusiasts" lend a Eurofighter Typhoon jet and pilot to race Richard Hammond's Buggati Veyron.

Segments have taken place on the deck of an aircraft carrier at least twice.

The production for CCTV's live-action TV adaptation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms had some help from the People's Liberation Army, who provided a few divisions of troops for use as extras.

The 1973-77 BBC series Warship was filmed on a number of Royal Navy vessels.

The Bill was backed By Scotland Yard and was allowed to use real police logos, actual uniforms and real equipment. When the show ended they bought all their props to prevent criminals getting hold of them.

The Mexican show El Equipo (tagline: "They know Good Defeats Evil"), basically a 60-minutes long government ad, used troops of the security agencies. And vehicles. And equipment. And classified locations...

In a decisively non-military example: The Australian series H2O: Just Add Water was backed by Australia's Gold Coast tourist board and Sea World, providing much of the Scenery Porn.

JAXA (the Japanese NASA counterpart mentioned in the Anime folder) gave their support to Kamen Rider Fourze; best seen with the use of the Tsukuba Space Center in the opening sequence and in a few episodes.

Similar to the America's Army example above, the Chinese FPS game 光荣使命 ("Glorious Mission") was developed by the People's Liberation Army as a recruiting tool & a means of recreation for active-duty soldiers. The initial version of the game was restricted for use only on military bases, followed by a civilian release sometime later calling itself "Passion Leads Army".

The World War I-themed game Valiant Hearts was done with the support of Mission Centenaire 14-18, the French government's official commission on remembrances for the Great War's 100th Anniversary.

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